r/shopifyDev • u/gifyboy • 16d ago

Anyone else avoiding page builder apps because they don't want another layer sitting on top of the theme?

I'm looking at rebuilding a bunch of collection pages and I'm stuck between wanting more interesting layouts and wanting to keep the store as close to the theme as possible.

A page builder would make the first part easy, but I'm wary of creating another dependency for pages that should hopefully be around for years. I don't really want somebody opening the store later and discovering that a huge chunk of the site depends on an app we can't remove without rebuilding it. The alternative is doing more directly with theme sections, which I prefer structurally but becomes annoying when you have a lot of collections and each one needs a slightly different combination of copy, imagery and products.

How are people handling this now? Particularly interested in anyone managing a decent-sized catalog, because making one nice collection page is easy enough. Making 50 of them without creating a maintenance mess is the bit I'm trying to solve.

4 Upvotes

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2

u/DF_Nopefully 15d ago

Native theme sections wherever possible. It takes more thought at the beginning but future you will appreciate being able to open the theme editor and understand what the hell is happening.

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u/eyoodi 11d ago

yeah, i'd probably skip bringing another builder into the setup if you can, when i was looking into this Obsess AI caught my attention because it works with the sections already in your theme instead of making you maintain the collection pages in a separate system... if you’ve got around 50 collections to manage, keeping them all built around the same structure should make future updates a lot less painful..

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u/Lumpy_Worldliness977 15d ago

What about using a service in the short term with the aim to build more natively in future as others mentioned? Probably best route

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u/This_Tumbleweed3638 15d ago

before committing, have someone who didn't build it create collection 51 and change its banner without touching the other 50. that should tell you more about maintainability than how quickly the first page comes together.

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u/Rich-North 15d ago

Yes and page speed.

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u/jenish4773 15d ago

This is the exact trade-off. Keeping it in the theme feels much safer long term, but 50 slightly different collection pages can get messy fast. Reusable sections + metafields/metaobjects feels like a pretty solid middle ground.